Black Project is proud to announce the return of a beer from our early days, a fan favorite, and a beer that we’ve had constant requests to recreate: LANCER.

Last released way back in February 2016, LANCER is a sour blonde ale made with Colorado wildflower honey. The beer is a product of the combination of microbes captured via our coolship and those found naturally in the honey. We believe that our use of high quality honey and a long, slow, mild fermentation by wild microbes protects and amplifies the delicate wildflower aroma.

This is a beer that is surprisingly difficult to successfully make. The truth is, we planned, brewed, and blended a batch for 2017 but ultimately decided that it wasn’t up to our standards. There is a fine line that we must walk between using enough honey for the end result we want and over-stressing our fragile wild yeast. The first time we made this beer, it took several months longer to be fully ready in the barrel than I had thought. Then the beer also proceeded to take it’s time with refermentation in the bottle- if I recall it took about 3-4 times longer to be fully carbonated and ready to sell than most of our other beers.

2017 LANCER was never bottled. It was dumped nearing the end of the honey fermentation in the barrel. We immediately worked to re-blend, acquire more honey, and make a new batch with some lessons learned from the beer we dumped.

This year’s version is now finally ready, in bottles, for our November lottery. In this batch, the secondary fermentation of the honey proceeded beautifully, slowly, and cleanly - leaving a tremendous amount of wildflower aroma. These floral notes mingle with the funky barnyard and stone fruit of the base beer. Bottle conditioning took several times longer than normal, again! We are finding that our mantra of letting time be our most important ingredient definitely holds true when combining our cultures with large amounts of honey.

2018 LANCER is the best batch yet, and we are all really proud to offer it again to the public. This beer will be released in our usual format, a majority of bottles available to the public will be sold via online lottery, and a small percentage will be held back to be sold over time in the tasting room (for on-site and to-go) from our bottle cooler.

Bottles are corked and capped, 500mL, and cost $18 each including sales tax and all fees.

Lottery entry window will run from Monday, November 19, at 12 noon (MST) through Thursday, November 22 at Midnight (MST). Bottle Pickup window will be November 30 - December 2nd, during tasting room hours.